MY LUCKY DAY OF THE JACKAL
Fifty years after his thriller became a sensation, Express columnist Frederick Forsyth – whose own life’s been quite an adventure – tells how he turned his ‘barmy’ idea into a winner
ALITTLE over 50 years ago, a foreign correspondent linked to the intelligence services returned to Britain, broke, jobless and homeless. In a quandary about what to do next, he came up with the “barmiest idea ever” to make quick money writing a novel. He camped out at a friend’s flat and tapped away on a manual typewriter while his chum was out at work. Within 35 days he’d produced a manuscript.
“On January 1, I was hungover. On January 2, I started,” the writer now recalls. “I was a vain little popinjay: I was outraged when four publishers turned it down.” The fifth didn’t.
The author was Frederick Forsyth and the book was The Day Of The Jackal. Published in 1971, it has sold countless millions of copies, has been translated into more than 30 languages, was turned into a famous film and transformed its creator into a star in his own right.
Forsyth, a long-running columnist on the Daily Express whose other hugely popular novels have sold in their tens of millions worldwide, has had a life to match anything in his own fiction: he reported on the assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle in the early Sixties – which was the basis for the plot of The Day Of The Jackal – witnessed the Biafran conflict and famine, found himself at the heart of the Cold War in East Berlin and, it was revealed a few years ago, worked for MI6, although he can be a little reticent about the details.
Not bad for a Kentish lad whose main ambition since he was a little boy was to pilot a Spitfire. Born in Kent in 1938 to a furrier father and a mother who ran a shop, Forsyth was not evacuated during the war, which gave him, he said, a sense of being an outsider, which is indeed the title of his autobiography.
His father encouraged him to travel and sent him to France and Germany when he was a boy, which meant he was able to pass off as a native in both countries – an invaluable skill in later life.
After a stint in the RAF, where he flew the de Havilland Vampire and was one of its youngest pilots, Forsyth became a journalist and found himself in Paris in the early 1960s.
It was a turbulent time in French history as Algeria, then a colony, fought for independence from France, and a right-wing paramilitary group, the Organisation Armée Secrète, fought to prevent it. “The Algerian war was still on, but de Gaulle was a pragmatist,” he recalls. “France had been forced out of Vietnam in defeat, and the right wingers refused to give up Algeria.
“I could pass for French, so I infiltrated the OAS, listened to what they were saying, passed it on to the Embassy, who passed it to London, who passed it back to the French.”
FORSYTH says this predates his MI6 association, although he concedes he may well have been on their radar. In 1962 the OAS made a failed assassination attempt on de Gaulle, trapping his limousine in a machine gun ambush.
Forsyth had to leave France and ended up in East Berlin, where similarly, his fluent German allowed him to blend in.
“It was 1963 and East Germany was ostracised by the West,” he says. “There was one single media office left, Reuters, which I worked for, and I thought it was wise to play the bumbling idiot Englishman, Bertie Wooster.
“But I could disappear into Germany and become a German so I found all these stories, such as students going on strike.”
As a westerner, Forsyth could get to west Berlin, which he did, and filed the stories under a pseudonym.
“No one had any idea where these stories were coming from,” he chuckles.
Was it an exciting time? “Tangling with the Stasi, you didn’t want to make too many mistakes with those bastards,” he says pithily. “It was the Russians who got me: I was crawling through the long grass counting tanks. I persuaded them I was East German, but they took me to the Stasi, who immediately found my real identity card.”
“You’re a bloody spy!” they told him. But Forsyth simply went into his Bertie Wooster act.
“‘Nein!” he protested. “I dropped my car keys when I was run off the road by a tractor and I was looking for them in the grass!’”
The East German secret police kept him in for 24 hours, during which time, Forsyth says, he feigned ignorance of everything.
“Finally they told me to follow them down a corridor. I didn’t know where I was going: to be executed? They opened the door and there was a car park. They were letting me go. They said, ‘You’re too stupid to be an agent!’”
Forsyth is coy about exactly when his
association with MI6 began but they’d certainly noticed him by then, as they did when he spent a few years reporting, first for the BBC and then as a freelance journalist, on the Biafran conflict during the Nigerian civil war.
It was a period during which almost two million Biafrans, mainly children, died of starvation, which he still speaks of with utter disgust, both at the fact it was allowed to happen and at what he claims was the BBC’s “slavish obsequiousness” to the Foreign Office wish to downplay the tragedy.
“I had to leave the BBC – I couldn’t tell lies and at that time they were extremely pro-government,” he says. “I left Biafra at Christmas 1969 when it collapsed. There was an ocean of dead and dying children. I was full of anger and I had no job.”
And so it was that he found himself staying with a friend and writing that first novel. And as he cast about for subject matter, he remembered his days in Paris and the attempt on de Gaulle’s life.
Even back then Forsyth had decided that the only way the OAS could ever succeed would be if they hired an outsider, totally unknown to the police. So dawned The Day Of The Jackal.
HIS EARLY attempt to find a publisher was hindered slightly by the fact that de Gaulle was still alive and well and living in France, until someone realised that it was the technical details in the book (Forsyth researches his novels as thoroughly as he did his journalism) and the manhunt that would provide the excitement along the way. “Harold Harris [a publisher, writer and journalist] said it had three things he’d never seen in his long career,” says Forsyth, who, incidentally, remains extremely modest about his success.
“He’d never seen a thriller where the protagonist wasn’t named.There were real characters having conversations with fictional characters. And there was an obsession with technical details.”
These included how to obtain a fake passport: “I got the idea from a forger. I was totally unknown. It was ForsythWho and the Day of the What? So I had to go to the underworld, though I went to the authorities later. It was the same when I had to find out about illegal guns for [his later book] The Dogs Of War.”
Indeed, the Dogs was said to have inspired the French real-life mercenary Bob Denard: he staged four coup attempts in the Comoros Islands and during one, all his soldiers were said to have had copies of “Les Chiens de Guerre”.
Now, unbelievably, 82, a father of two and grandfather of four, Forsyth lives happily in the countryside with his second wife Sandy (“the CO”), to whom he has been married for nearly 30 years.
Did HE imagine this life when growing up?“No! I was taken to a fighter base when I was six.The pilots made a fuss of me, put me in the Spitfire cockpit and I was sniffing the odours of oil and leather and looking at the propeller through the blue Kentish sky. “I vowed I was going to fly a Spitfire, although it took me until I was 74 to do so. I was going to get my wings somehow: it propelled me through my school years and I got a pilot’s licence at 16.”
Going back to the Jackal, the assassin’s real identity is never made clear, not even at the end. Did Forsyth have a sense of who he really was? “Well, I thought he was probably ex-Army, spoke good French.” “Sounds a bit like you,” I say, cheekily. “I was RAF,” says Forsyth firmly. But he’s trying not to smile.